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Show 366 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT ments of the law; only by positive congressional action could such reversion be achieved.75 Congress might have tried to enforce this provision of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 when the public was protesting against the large unsold acreages still in possession of the railroads in the seventies and eighties, but it preferred to resort to forfeiture where railroads had not abided by the provisions of the granting acts. Forfeiture might return unearned grants to the government but would presumably leave untouched the earned but unsold lands. The homestead-agrarian element could not have foreseen how another provision of the granting act of 1864 would cause them much anguish and almost frenzied political action in the seventies and eighties. This was section 21 which required that the railroads receiving land bounties should pay to the government "the cost of surveying, selecting, and conveying the same ... as the titles shall be required by said company. . . ." By failing to tender the cost of survey to the government and thus delaying patents, the railroads were able to postpone for many years the assessment of taxes against their land. In the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1864 Congress breached the basic features of its land grant policy, a fact which some historians, in discussing the role of the government in western development, have overlooked. First, it dropped the double-minimum price for the government-reserved sections within the 40-mile strip of land through which the Pacific railroads were to build, leaving the basic price for the reserved sections $1.25 an acre. It is impossible to determine whether this omission was deliberate or whether members of Congress were really aware that the Act of March 3, 1853, to. extend preemption rights to settlers on government-reserved lands within the primary grant areas, might 75 W. A. McAllister, "A Study of Railroad Land Grant Disposals in California with Reference to the Western Pacific, the Central Pacific and the Southern Pacific Railroad Companies" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1940). pp. 175-76. be interpreted as requiring for all future as well as past grants that the alternate reserved sections within the primary area be doubled in price. John P. Usher, Secretary of the Interior, declared that the reserved sections, in the absence of specific legislation to the contrary, would be held at $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, his Commissioner of the General Land Office, Joseph Wilson, and Usher's and Wilson's successors, James Harlan and J. M. Edmunds held to the contrary, and their view prevailed. To settle the matter, Congress on March 6, 1868, definitely established the price at $2.50.76 The second breach in the well-established land grant policy of the double-minimum priced land was the action of the General Land Office in allowing the Burlington and Missouri Railroad to select a portion of its land grant in a region far distant from its line and one which would in no way be tributary to it, as has been seen. Great indignation was expressed by the settlers in those counties that received no benefit from the Burlington but had much of the land withdrawn from homestead and ultimately offered at prices comparable to those the speculators charged. Reacting to this indignation, Governor Paddock in 1867 denounced the withdrawal of these remote tracts from homesteading and spoke of "the evil effects of this baleful system of land grants . . . this rapid absorption of the public domain ... by railroad monopolists and land speculators."77 The third breach in the land grant policy was an Act of June 2, 1864, wherein Congress permitted three cross-state railroads in Iowa (which had the usual land grants of the fifties 74 See the summary of the matter in the report of Commissioner J. M. Edmunds, GLO Annual Report, 1865 in H. Ex. Doc, 39th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 2, No. 1 (Serial No. 1248), 35-36; 15 Stat. 39. 77 Addison E. Sheldon, Land Systems and Land Policies in Nebraska ("Publications of the Nebraska State Historical Society," Vol. XXII [Lincoln, Neb., 1936]), 90-92; Overton, Burlington West, pp. 329-32 and map opposite p. 332 showing the location of the remote lands. |